OK, so, unlike everything else this week, GURPS Cyberpunk (1990) is a generic genre setting book. That is, it is designed to provide resources for cyberpunk roleplaying, it isn’t a GURPS conversion of R. Talsorian’s game or a license of Neuromancer or anything like that. The book was intended to provide GURPS with a financial windfall and generally modernize the line, but Steve Jackson Games ran into a problem with the feds. That triangle on the cover is no exaggeration!

So the author, Lloyd Blankenship, also ran SJG’s bulletin board system. Someone posted information about the 911 emergency system on the board, which was reported to the Secret Service, who used that as grounds to raid SJG’s offices (you have to admit, with so many conspiracy theory-centric stuff produced by SJG over there years, this is a richly ironic turn of events). When they did, they found, and seized, the manuscript of the Cyberpunk sourcebook, calling it a “manual for computer crime.” This, of course, is baloney and SJG eventually won out in court (in 1993) and got a hell of a marketing angle along the way. The really wild thing about this is this raid was similar to a bunch of others in 1990 that were freaking out internet folks out, and they led to the foundation of the Electronic Freedom Foundation — the SJG case was the first they worked on.

Anyway, the book is about what you’d expect. Sort of. A lot of the material mirrors stuff available in R. Talsorian’s game and Shadowrun and similar stuff. The aesthetic doesn’t seem quite right though. That’s not so much that they got it wrong, more that cyberpunk, like so many other things at the time, hadn’t crystallized yet in pop culture’s mind’s eye — it is a little less gritty, a little more sleek, a bit more in line with traditional sci fi visions. Rather than Blade Runner, it feels a bit like computer stuff filtered through late 80s Marvel comics — bright, bold, not really tethered to anything in reality. It’s kind of a delight!